Top 10 sustainability campaigns of 2014;
Pressuring Lego to part ways with Shell, putting a stop to the gendered marketing of toys and fighting for the survival of bees: these are the 10 campaigns that have taken 2014 by stormRead more end-of-year reflections and new year's predictions

BYLINE: Frances Buckingham

SECTION: GUARDIAN SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

LENGTH: 1569 words

Greenpeace: Lego's partnership with Shell

This Greenpeace campaign gets top marks for recognising the creative opportunities that iconic Lego brand offered for engaging the public. While the Everything is NOT Awesome video was the most viewed in Greenpeace's history, the images of Lego characters staging a series of protests outside Shell garages and international landmarks kept interest alive on social media. The online campaign was supported by a child-led protest outside Shell's HQ highlighting the emotional link between climate change and future generations.

Lego announced in October that it would not renew its 50-year partnership with Shell. Possibly one of the most high-profile campaigns of all time, not everyone was convinced by the approach, believing it too simplistic and failing to acknowledge how entrenched oil is in society (not least as a raw material for Lego bricks).

The Pacific Climate Warriors (350.org): Canoes v Coal

The David versus Goliath campaign of the year. In October, a group of climate warriors from 13 Pacific Islands travelled to Australia to raise awareness of the impact of the fossil fuel industry on their homes and livelihoods. With the campaign slogan "we are not drowning, we are fighting" they used traditional handmade canoes to paddle out into the harbour of the world's largest coal handling port to stop exports for a day. The Pacific Climate Warriors then joined Australians in peaceful occupations of fossil fuel companies.

The message that the islanders are no longer content to sit and wait as the "canary in the coal mine" for climate change was made very clear. The true measure of success will be if the islands are guaranteed a future.

Oxfam America: Behind the Brands

Oxfam is one of the few NGOs that seems able to balance the use of carrot and stick with major corporates, calling out bad performance while still celebrating the good.

Its Behind the Brands campaign encourages people to use its scorecard to tell the 'Big 10' food and beverage companies exactly what needs to change in their supply chains. In May, Oxfam started to highlight harmful food production practices that contribute to climate change. Kellogg and General Mills were identified as the worst offenders.

After only a few months of Oxfam applying the stick, both companies announced strengthened climate commitments. General Mills, previously ranked last on climate change policies, made some more ambitious commitments and was rewarded by a significant improvement in its climate score.

Let Toys Be Toys: ending gender labelling

Girls like pink, boys like blue. Girls like dolls, boys like superheroes. Retailers may think these old stereotypes hold true, but parents - their target consumers - don't. A parent-led campaign, which grew out of a discussion thread on parenting site Mumsnet, brought together mums and dads frustrated by the rise of gender-based promotion and marketing to children.

After 14 retailers in the UK agreed to stop gendered marketing, the campaign was then extended to books, asking publishers and retailers to allow children to choose freely what kinds of books and stories interest them. In November, Dorling Kindersley, Chad Valley and Miles Kelly Books all confirmed that they will not be publishing new titles labelled for boys and girls. Ladybird also pledged to stop labelling books in this way as it did not want "to be seen limiting children".

Avaaz: Peoples' Climate March

The growth in people-powered campaign movements has been one of the campaign success stories of the last decade. With more than 40 million members globally, it is relatively easy for organisations such as Avaaz to mobilise protestors. In September, hundreds of thousands of people marched in New York, London and across the world calling for 100% clean energy from policymakers and business.

A small number of progressive business leaders from IKEA, Unilever, Ben & Jerry's and NRG joined the myriad campaigning organisations. Patagonia closed its stores so that its employees could join the march alongside chief executive Rose Marcario.

Although it is difficult to assess the tangible impact of such protest events, the day was seen by many as a seminal moment in the climate change movement. It made the front page of many national newspapers, increasing pressure on politicians and decision-makers worldwide. President Obama acknowledged the occasion in his regular address: "Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we do not hear them. We have to answer the call."

WWF UK: Save Virunga

Virunga, Africa's oldest national park, came under threat when the Congolese government awarded three concessions for oil exploration. Save Virunga is a global initiative that gives a voice to local communities who depend on the survival of the park for their livelihoods and recognises how important local actors are to the long-term survival of protected areas.

WWF-UK added its weight to the campaign in 2013, filing a complaint against oil company Soco under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Meanwhile 750,000 WWF supporters signed a petition, and in June 2014 Soco announced that it would end its operations in the park.

The cause has just been given a boost by the film Virunga, backed by actor Leonardo di Caprio, which is being broadcast on Netflix. The movie brings the focus back to the local communities, telling the tale of the park rangers and the risks that they are taking to protect one of the world's richest pockets of biodiversity that is home to some of the last mountain gorillas.

Platform London: Oil and Arts Sponsorship

With a focus on the oil sector, Platform uses education, exhibitions, art events and book projects to inspire change. One focus area is sponsorship of major art and cultural institutions.

In June, as part of the Art Not Oil coalition, a week of creative activism took place around the opening of the National Portrait Gallery's opening of the BP Portrait Award. In one protest, 25 performers had oil poured over their faces and created "portraits" throughout the gallery.

Platform also published Picture This - A Portrait of 25 Years of BP Sponsorship, which looked back at the chequered social and environmental history of BP and the role of art in society in relation to ethics and sponsorship. While no notable victory has been recorded, this campaign has started to stigmatise cultural and arts institutions funded by oil companies in a similar way to the highly successful fossil-fuel divestment campaign.

Friends of the Earth: The Bee Cause

Launched in 2012, this campaign scored a notable victory in the UK in 2014 when the UK government announced it was to launch a National Pollinator Strategy - a 10 year plan to help pollinating insects survive and thrive.

In the last few years, much attention has been paid to the plight of bees and their loss of habitat. Alongside traditional campaign tactics, Friends of the Earth also provided practical advice on the creation of bee-friendly spaces and asked supporters to pledge to provide food, water and nesting spaces for bees.

38 Degrees: Matalan #PayUp

On April 24 2012, a building housing five garment factories in Bangladesh collapsed killing 1,138 people and injuring more than 2,000. Many of the major brands whose products were manufactured at the Rana Plaza factory contributed to the official compensation fund for survivors and their families. Matalan was the only major British retailer not to donate - until 38 Degrees launched the #PayUp campaign that is.

Following pressure from members of 38 Degrees, Matalan announced it had paid into the official compensation fund, but would not disclose how much. In a hyper-transparent world this was seen by 38 Degrees as an incomplete response and its members took the campaign to the high streets and directly to Matalan's stores. Following this action the company finally divulged the amount and, while £60,000 was seen as a win by 38 Degrees, the organisation is keeping up the pressure on Matalan to donate more.

350.org: Fossil Fuel Divestment

The fastest growing divestment campaign ever, the movement had a turning point in the US this year when it was announced that the Rockefellers Brothers Fund would withdraw its investments from fossil fuels investments.

The campaign first took hold in the US with Bill McKibben's Do the Math speaking tour. The activist took to the road by bus and at each venue in the US was joined by artists, actors and musicians, all working together to empower the audience to act through a mix of music, interactive, video and discussions. The campaign is now seeing success in Europe, with the University of Glasgow the first academic institution to announce it will divest. This was followed by the Diocese of Oxford becoming the first religious institution to follow suit.

Frances Buckingham is an associate at SustainAbility and editor of Radar.

What campaigns have inspired you this year? Tweet us @GuardianSustBiz with #GSB2014 to let us know! To get in touch with ideas for coverage in 2015, email tess.riley@theguardian.com

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LOAD-DATE: December 26, 2014

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JOURNAL-CODE: WEBGNS

Wall brown butterfly 'may be a victim of climate change';
Evidence suggests butterfly is dying out because warmer weather is causing generations to hatch out too late in the year to survive, scientists say

BYLINE: Patrick Barkham

SECTION: ENVIRONMENT

LENGTH: 714 words

The dramatic decline of one of Britain's butterflies may be because climate change is creating a "lost generation" according to research by Belgian scientists.

The disappearance of the wall brown ( Lasiommata megera) from swathes of southern England has mystified conservationists for two decades but new evidence suggests that the butterfly is dying out because warmer weather is causing generations to hatch out too late in the year to survive.

In recent years, instead of the offspring of the wall butterflies found flying in July and August spending winter as a caterpillar before emerging as a butterfly the following year, warm conditions encourage the caterpillars to quickly turn into a butterfly by September and October.

By emerging so late in the year, these butterflies fall into what researchers, led by Professor Hans Van Dyck of Louvain University, call a "developmental trap". By autumn, it is too cold and there are not suitable plants for their offspring to eat before winter. In effect, these autumn butterflies are a lost generation, leaving no caterpillars that can survive to become butterflies the following spring.

Similarly doomed generations of other species have also been found flying in the autumn in recent years, including the white admiral, Duke of Burgundy and orange tip, which traditionally only fly in spring or summer.

In Britain, the wall has decreased by 86% since 1976 - vanishing from much of central and southern England - but it has survived at coastal sites.

In research published in the international journal Oikos, enclosed pots of captive-bred wall caterpillars were placed at coastal and inland sites in Belgium of similar latitude during the summer. All the caterpillars placed at inland sites quickly developed to become a third generation of wall butterflies which emerged in the autumn. At coastal sites, however, just 42.5% developed into a third generation, with the majority following the species' traditional life-cycle - spending winter as a caterpillar before emerging as a butterfly the following year.

The scientists found that the micro-climate at the inland sites was on average 1.2C warmer than at coastal sites, suggesting that cooler conditions by the sea enabled the butterfly to maintain its traditional life-cycle.

While climate change should benefit many sun-loving butterfly species, the fate of the wall could be shared by many other insects struggling to adapt their lifestyles quickly enough to rapid changes in temperature.

The white admiral is another butterfly once only spotted in July which is now producing a small extra generation which flies in September, when scientists doubt it can produce offspring capable of surviving the winter.

"This year there were a lot of unusual sightings of moths in the autumn - late spring species suddenly being seen again," said Richard Fox of Butterfly Conservation. "It probably is an effect that will be seen across species that use temperature and other environmental cues that relate to temperature as part of the decision-making process driving their development."

Fox said he hoped that natural selection would ensure that the genotypes of wall browns that try to squeeze an extra generation into the year are selected out of existence "but whether the butterfly can adapt and not fall into this trap is a big question - some species adapt and thrive but lots of species become extinct."

Other butterfly species have surprised scientists by the speed in which they have adapted to changing conditions.

In North America, a subspecies of the quino checkerspot butterfly defied expectations it would become extinct by moving to higher altitudes and choosing a new plant on which to feed.

In Britain, brown argus caterpillars switched to a new food plant in warmer conditions, enabling the butterfly to rapidly expand its range northwards.

The Belgian scientists stressed that their findings are not the "smoking gun" and further research is required. Fox warned that there may be other factors apart from climate change causing the wall's decline. Another theory is that increased nitrogen pollution is changing vegetation and stopping its caterpillars from feeding successfully.

"It's a very elegant theory but there may be more to it," said Fox. "There often is with butterflies."

LOAD-DATE: December 24, 2014

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Bitter winters for Peru's alpaca farmers combating climate change;
Stud alpacas and mini-reservoirs to irrigate new crops are helping farmers on Peru's Altiplano to protect their herds in the face of fluctuating weather

BYLINE: Sam Jones in Ayaviri

SECTION: GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

LENGTH: 742 words

Until last year, the greatest disruption to the lives of the alpaca farmers of Melgar in recent times had been the arrival of the Shining Path guerrillas in the province almost three decades ago to spread their Maoist doctrine, destroy communication masts and kill those they deemed enemies of the revolution.

The winter of 2013, however, brought its own particular problems. Heavy rains soaked the Altiplano, leaving the animals on which thousands of families depend sick and weak. Some female alpacas began to miscarry their crias, while many of the animals that survived eventually succumbed to infections and the cold.

As the snow came, Susana Mamani watched more and more of her herd sicken and die. "Last year, it rained a lot and my young animals got sick with toxaemia," says the 33-year-old farmer. "It was colder than normal and it snowed early. I lost around a third of my 50 alpacas." Despite her prayers, she was left to look on helplessly as many froze to death on the hillsides.

Existence in this corner of south-east Peru - where the odd mobile phone, fence or corrugated iron roof on an adobe hut are among the few concessions to modern life - has never been easy. The farmers who tend their animals in a landscape that sits 4,500 metres (14,760 feet) above sea level are, by nature and necessity, stoical.

But the weather of recent years worries them. The people of Melgar did not need the presence of delegates from 190 countries in the Peruvian capital, Lima, to discuss climate change to confirm its effects; they have only to look at themselves, the land and their animals. "When it is cold, it is colder than before," says Mamani. "When it is dry, we have more sun. The weather has been changing."

Susana Chape, a 53-year-old farmer who supports her three sons and four daughters with the 2,000 soles [$680] she earns each year from her alpacas, cows and sheep, offers a similar observation. "Over the past two or three years, we've seen a change in the weather, with the summers getting hotter and the winters getting colder," she says in a mixture of Spanish and Quechua. "There's more rain now and more snow, and it makes me sad to see my animals die."

Faced with a climate that increasingly threatens their livelihoods, the farmers have been working with Soluciones Prácticas (the Latin American branch of the British NGO Practical Action ) to protect their animals. Over the past three years, the charity has built 61 spring-fed mini-reservoirs to help the farmers irrigate new crops, such as oats and clover, which have improved the alpacas' diets by providing year-round fodder. In previous years, the sun had scorched the grasses that grow on the hillsides, leaving them too yellow and dry for even the hungriest alpacas to eat.

Soluciones Prácticas has also introduced stud alpacas to help swell the depleted herds and to enhance the quality of the animals' wool. The $700,000 project has enabled the farmers to sell about 160 tonnes over the same period, with the finest wool grade now fetching up to 44,000 soles ($15,000) a tonne.

While the changes cannot completely safeguard either animals or incomes from climatic variations, they have afforded the farmers of Melgar a little more control over their economic fates.

"My ancestors had to work harder because they didn't have the genetic science we have," says Elio Chila Ccahubna, whose 70 alpacas bring him 2,000-3,000 soles a year. "Now we can choose the characteristics we want to get the most beautiful animals with the finest wool." As a bonus, he adds, the alpacas are finding the oats that make up much of their winter rations delicious.

Increased prices are also allowing the people of Melgar to plan. One of Chape's sons is studying to be a teacher; she hopes her other children will also have the chance to choose their own careers. "If they want to work with alpacas, that's great," she says. "But I want them to have the choice."

Mamani, whose bowler hat and thick cardigan shield her from both the punishing Andean sun and the cold that comes when it sets, has ideas of her own. Her nine-year-old daughter lives an hour away by car so she can go to school. "I am confident that my daughter will get a good education because I will be able to pay for it," Mamani says. Unlike Chape, she has no desire to see her daughter spend her life herding alpacas on the freezing, burning hills of Melgar. "I don't want her to do this work. I want her to become a professional."

LOAD-DATE: December 24, 2014

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JOURNAL-CODE: WEBGNS

Australia records biggest emissions drop in a decade as carbon tax kicks in;
Greens and conservation group say significant drop in annual emissions shows the carbon price, which was scrapped by the Abbott government, was effective

BYLINE: Oliver Milman

SECTION: ENVIRONMENT

LENGTH: 740 words

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions dropped 1.4% in the second full year of the carbon price - the largest recorded annual decrease in the past decade.

Data released by the Department of the Environment (pdf) showed that emissions in the June quarter rose 0.4%. However, annual emissions to June 2014 dropped 1.4%.

This period includes the second 12 months of the carbon pricing system, which was introduced by the previous federal government in 2012. The Coalition fulfilled an election pledge by abolishing carbon pricing in July.

Emissions reduction accelerated during the two-year span of carbon pricing, with emissions edging down by 0.8% in the first 12 months of the system.

The latest greenhouse gas inventory showed emissions from the electricity sector, the industry most affected by carbon pricing, fell 4% in the year to June.

Electricity emissions account for a third of Australia's emissions output, which stood at 542.6m tonnes in the year to June, down from 550.2m tonnes in the previous 12 months.

Emissions from transport dropped 0.4% in the year to June, with gases released by the agriculture industry decreasing by 2.6%. Industrial processes emitted 1.3% less greenhouse gas during the year, although fugitive emissions, such as those from mining, rose 5.1%.

Electricity emissions peaked in 2008 and have steadily decreased ever since, driven by a number of factors such as the winding down of parts of Australia's manufacturing base and energy efficiency initiatives.

The Greens leader, Christine Milne, said: "These figures demonstrate to the rest of the world just how effective our carbon price was at bringing down pollution. This is the biggest ever drop recorded and the price made it happen.

"The Abbott government will go down in history as taking the biggest backward step in tackling global warming Australia has ever seen. As well as being terrible for the climate, it is a tragedy for Australia in terms of lost investment and jobs in the clean industries of the future."

Victoria McKenzie-McHarg, the climate change program manager at the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the figures demonstrated the carbon price was effective.

"We've never seen a decrease like this. Yes, there was a lot else happening in this time, but it is an indication that the policy was working," she said.

"The price did better than expected. Also, we would have seen deeper cuts in emissions over time as the price created a long-term economic signal and changed investment in energy. We never expected to see the biggest reductions straight away."

The Coalition's emissions reduction fund, a $2.55bn initiative that will provide voluntary grants to businesses that want to reduce their emissions, will begin distributing cash via reverse auctions in the first quarter of next year.

The government's Climate Change Authority said this week it was "unlikely" the new policy would meet Australia's minimum goal of a 5% reduction in emissions by 2020, on 2000 levels. The analysis followed similar pessimism raised by the UN and independent bodies about the new regime.

McKenzie-McHarg said: "It is difficult to see how it will deliver the required cuts. It takes money from taxpayers and gives it to polluters. This reverses the longstanding principle of polluter pays, which sets a dangerous and expensive precedent."

The Coalition has maintained that the carbon price delivered minimal emissions cuts at a large cost to the economy and household electricity bills. The government estimates the repeal of the system saves the average household about $550 a year.

The environment minister, Greg Hunt, said Australia's emissions trajectory was going down, making him confident the 5% cut goal would be met through bids for carbon abatement money.

"I am not just confident, I am exceptionally confident that we'll achieve our targets," he told Sky News. "And a couple of very significant things have occurred.

"We see that there is a lower trajectory than expected. I also note that the pipeline of likely bids is far higher than we had anticipated or expected. Material that wasn't before the Climate Change Authority. And so we are in better shape than I had ever hoped at this stage. And I'm very pleased."

The next set of quarterly emissions figures will be released in February. Interim data, released by consultancy firm Pitt&Sherry, has shown Australia's emissions have increased since the repeal of the carbon price.

LOAD-DATE: December 24, 2014

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JOURNAL-CODE: WEBGNS

Restored Forests Are Making Inroads Against Climate Change

BYLINE: By JUSTIN GILLIS

SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; THE BIG FIX; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 2513 words

LA VIRGEN, Costa Rica -- Over just a few decades in the mid-20th century, this small country chopped down a majority of its ancient forests. But after a huge conservation push and a wave of forest regrowth, trees now blanket more than half of Costa Rica.

Far to the south, the Amazon forest was once being quickly cleared to make way for farming, but Brazil has slowed the loss so much that it has done more than any other country to limit the emissions leading to global warming.

And on the other side of the world, in Indonesia, bold new promises have been made in the past few months to halt the rampant cutting of that country's forests, backed by business interests with the clout to make it happen.

In the battle to limit the risks of climate change, it has been clear for decades that focusing on the world's immense tropical forests -- saving the ones that are left, and perhaps letting new ones grow -- is the single most promising near-term strategy.

That is because of the large role that forests play in what is called the carbon cycle of the planet. Trees pull the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, out of the air and lock the carbon away in their wood and in the soil beneath them. Destroying them, typically by burning, pumps much of the carbon back into the air, contributing to climate change.

Over time, humans have cut down or damaged at least three-quarters of the world's forests, and that destruction has accounted for much of the excess carbon that is warming the planet.

But now, driven by a growing environmental movement in countries that are home to tropical forests, and by mounting pressure from Western consumers who care about sustainable practices, corporate and government leaders are making a fresh push to slow the cutting -- and eventually to halt it. In addition, plans are being made by some of those same leaders to encourage forest regrowth on such a giant scale that it might actually pull a sizable fraction of human-released carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it into long-term storage.

With the recent signs of progress, long-wary environmental groups are permitting themselves a burst of optimism about the world's forests.

''The public should take heart,'' said Rolf Skar, who helps lead forest conservation work for the environmental group Greenpeace. ''We are at a potentially historic moment where the world is starting to wake up to this issue, and to apply real solutions.''

Still, Greenpeace and other groups expect years of hard work as they try to hold business leaders and politicians accountable for the torrent of promises they have made lately. The momentum to slow or halt deforestation is fragile, for many reasons. And even though rich Western governments have hinted for years that they might be willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to help poor countries save their forests, they have allocated only a few billion dollars.

Around the world, trees are often cut down to make room for farming, and so the single biggest threat to forests remains the need to feed growing populations, particularly an expanding global middle class with the means to eat better. Saving forests, if it can be done, will require producing food much more intensively, on less land.

''For thousands of years, the march of civilization has been associated with converting natural ecosystems to crops that serve only man,'' said Glenn Hurowitz, a managing director at Climate Advisers, a consultancy in Washington.

''What's happening now is that we are trying to break that paradigm. If that succeeds, it's going to be a major development in human history.''

A Remarkable Comeback

Deep inside a Costa Rican rain forest, white-faced capuchin monkeys leapt through the tree tops. Nunbirds and toucans flew overhead, and a huge butterfly, flashing wings of an iridescent blue, fluttered through the air.

Ignoring the profusion of life around him, Bernal Paniagua Guerrero focused his gaze on a single 20-foot tree, placing a tape measure around the spindly trunk and calling a number out to his sister, Jeanette Paniagua Guerrero, who recorded it on a clipboard.

With that, the tree, a black manú just over two inches in diameter, entered the database of the world's scientific knowledge. Its growth will be tracked year by year until it dies a natural death -- or somebody decides to chop it down for the valuable, rot-resistant wood.

The Paniaguas and their co-worker, Enrique Salicette Nelson, work for an American scientist, Robin Chazdon, helping her chronicle a remarkable comeback.

Cuatro Rios, the forest they were standing in one recent day, looked, to a casual eye, as if it must have been there forever. Trees stretched as high as 100 feet, and a closed canopy of leaves cast the understory into deep shade -- one hallmark of a healthy tropical rain forest.

In fact, the land was a cattle pasture only 45 years ago. When the market for beef fell, the owners let the forest reclaim it. Now the Cuatro Rios forest, near the tiny village of La Virgen, is a study plot for Dr. Chazdon, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, who has become a leading voice in arguing that large-scale forest regrowth can help to solve some of the world's problems.

Indeed, forests are already playing an outsize role in limiting the damage humans are doing to the planet.

For the entire geologic history of the earth, carbon in various forms has flowed between the ground, the air and the ocean. A large body of scientific evidence shows that the amount of carbon in the air at any given time, in the form of carbon dioxide, largely determines the planet's temperature.

The burning of coal, oil and natural gas effectively moves carbon out of the ground and into the active carbon cycle operating at the earth's surface, causing a warming of the globe that scientists believe is more rapid now than in any similar period of geologic history.

Though the higher temperatures are causing extensive problems, including heat waves and rising seas, the increasing carbon dioxide also acts as a sort of plant fertilizer. The gas is the primary source of the carbon that plants, using the energy of sunlight, turn into sugars and woody tissue.

Scientific reports suggest that 20 percent to 25 percent of the carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air is being absorbed by trees and other plants, which keep taking up more and more even as human emissions keep rising.

But when people damage or destroy forests, that puts carbon dioxide into the air, worsening the warming problem. Historically, forests have been chopped down all over the planet. Now they are actually regrowing across large stretches of the Northern Hemisphere, and the most worrisome destruction is occurring in relatively poor countries in the tropics.

Scientists concluded decades ago that deforestation must be stopped, both to limit climate change and to conserve the world's biological diversity. These days, they are also coming to understand the huge potential of new or recovering forests to help pull dangerous emissions out of the air.

''Every time I hear about a government program that is going to spend billions of dollars on some carbon capture and storage program, I just laugh and think, what is wrong with a tree?'' said Nigel Sizer, director of forest programs at the World Resources Institute, a think tank in Washington. ''All you have to do is look out the window, and the answer is there.''

Scientists are still trying to figure out how much of a difference an ambitious forest regrowth strategy could make. But a leading figure in the discussion -- Richard A. Houghton, acting president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts -- has argued for turning some 1.2 billion acres of degraded or marginally productive agricultural land into forests.

That is an exceedingly ambitious figure, equal to about half the land in the United States. But researchers say it would be possible, in principle, if farming in poor countries became far more efficient. Some countries have already pledged to restore tens of millions of acres.

Dr. Houghton believes that if his target were pursued aggressively, and coupled with stronger efforts to protect existing forests, the rapid growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be slowed sharply or possibly even halted.

That, he believes, would give the world a few decades for an orderly transition away from fossil fuels. ''This is not a solution, but it would help us buy some time,'' Dr. Houghton said.

Finding an Effective Tactic

The Amazon, spreading across nine countries of South America, is the world's largest tropical forest. The majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, which for decades treated it as a limitless resource.

Sometimes aided by United States government funding for development, Brazil encouraged road construction that effectively opened the forest to settlement, including illegal land grabs. Crews harvested select trees for timber and then cut or burned the rest to make room for cattle ranching and soybean farming.

Deforestation was so rampant that by the middle of the last decade, 17 percent of the Amazon had been cut, and millions more acres had been damaged. Environmental groups worldwide sounded the alarm, as did indigenous and traditional peoples whose ancestors had lived in the forest for thousands of years.

As deforestation hit a peak in 2004, the Brazilian government came under international condemnation, and it began trying to halt the destruction. In 2006, environmental groups found a way to bring marketplace pressure to bear.

Crops grown on deforested land, notably soybeans, were being used to produce meat for Western companies like McDonald's, creating a potential liability in the eyes of their customers. Greenpeace invaded McDonald's restaurants and plastered posters of Ronald McDonald wielding a chain saw. That company and others responded by pressuring their suppliers, who imposed a moratorium on products linked to deforestation.

The Brazilian government used satellites to step up its monitoring, cut off loans to some farmers in counties with high deforestation rates, and used aggressive police tactics against illegal logging and clearing. Brazilian state governments and large business groups, including some beef producers, joined the efforts.

The intense pressure resulted in a sharp drop in deforestation, by 83 percent, over the past decade. Moreover, the Brazilian ministry of agriculture began to focus on helping farmers raise yields without needing additional land.

Not only were millions of acres of forest saved, but the carbon dioxide kept out of the air by Brazil's success also far exceeded anything any other country had ever done to slow global warming. Norway put up substantial funds to aid the effort, but otherwise, Brazil did it without much international help.

With so little money from abroad, the gains in Brazil are considered fragile, especially if a future government were to lose interest in forest protection. Daniel C. Nepstad, an American forest scientist who has worked in Brazil for decades and now heads a group called the Earth Innovation Institute, said, ''We could still see a huge slide backward.''

The Next Big Test

With deforestation somewhat under control in Brazil, Indonesia is becoming a big test of the environmental groups' strategy.

Deforestation is rampant there, with people chopping down even national forests with impunity. The biggest reason is to clear land for the lucrative production of vegetable oil from the fruit of a type of palm tree.

Just a handful of companies sell the oil -- used in a wide array of consumer goods like soap, ice cream, confections and lipstick -- into global markets, and the environmental groups have been targeting these big middlemen. Companies controlling the bulk of the global palm-oil trade have recently signed no-deforestation pledges, and Indonesia's influential chamber of commerce recently threw its weight behind a demand for new forest legislation in the country.

But even if Indonesia takes strong action, there are fears that the gains could prove fleeting. The economic incentive to chop down forests remains powerful, and crackdowns on deforestation can just spur profiteers to go elsewhere.

''Asian companies are rushing into Africa and grabbing as much land as possible,'' said Mr. Hurowitz, of Climate Advisers. ''That's kind of scary.''

Still, with hopes running high that the world may finally be rounding a corner on the deforestation problem, attention is turning to the possibility of large-scale forest regrowth.

Dr. Chazdon believes strongly in halting deforestation, but she says that many of the plots of old-growth forest that have already been saved are too small to ensure the long-term survival of the plants and animals in them. Forest expansion onto nearby land could help to conserve that biological diversity, in addition to pulling carbon dioxide out of the air.

But the strategy presents many challenges. It will require abandoning marginal agricultural land, meaning the remaining farms will have to become more efficient to keep up with demand for food, as well as a growing demand for biofuels. And some scientists have warned that if the strategy is poorly executed, agriculture could merely be pushed away from forests into grasslands or savannas, which themselves contain huge amounts of carbon that could escape into the atmosphere.

Costa Rica, a ''green republic'' famous worldwide for its efforts to protect forests, shows how difficult a forest restoration strategy can be in practice.

Legal protection is minimal for much of the forest that has grown there in recent decades. The workers who help Dr. Chazdon track her plots often see telltale signs of illegal hunting and logging, and they say the authorities are lax about stopping it. ''So many ugly things happen that we just lose a little faith,'' said Mr. Paniagua, one of the workers.

Moreover, a wave of pineapple production to supply a growing world market is sweeping the country, tempting many owners to reclear their land. Growing Chinese demand, in particular, has raised the fear that ''the whole of Costa Rica will be paved in pineapples,'' said Carlos de la Rosa, director of La Selva Biological Station, a famed research outpost where Dr. Chazdon does much of her work.

But for now, the second-growth forests of Costa Rica, covering roughly 14 percent of the land area of the country, at least show what may be possible if the world gets more ambitious about tackling global warming. Brazil, too, is beginning to see regrowth on a large scale in the Amazon, and is spending millions to restore forests along its Atlantic coast.

Decades of watching the Costa Rican forests recover have taught Dr. Chazdon that, at least in areas that still have healthy forests nearby to supply seeds, the main thing human beings need to do is just get out of the way. After all, forests were recovering from fires and other natural calamities long before people ever came along to chop them down.

''The forests know how to do this,'' Dr. Chazdon said. ''They've been doing it forever, growing back.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/science/earth/restored-forests-are-making-inroads-against-climate-change-.html

LOAD-DATE: December 25, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: A second-growth forest in Costa Rica. The country's experience shows how difficult a forest restoration strategy can be in practice. (A1)
MONITORING REGROWTH: Bernal Paniagua Guerrero measured a tree in Costa Rica as part of extensive research on forest regrowth. The land was a cattle pasture only 45 years ago.
TREE BY TREE: Spray paint is used to help researchers keep track of growth in the Cuatro Rios forest.
BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY: An early morning scene in La Selva Biological Station, a research outpost. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURE: Protesters in Rio de Janeiro in September called for curbs on carbon emissions. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES)
COMPETITION: Unloading palm fruit, a lucrative commodity that has led to forest clearings in Indonesia. (PHOTOGRAPH BY YT HARYONO/REUTERS) (A8)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Overstock.com rejoins controversial lobbying group Alec bucking trend;
Top tech companies have cut ties with Alec due to climate change stance Retailer says it rejoined group to work on internet sales tax issues

BYLINE: Dominic Rushe in New York

SECTION: US NEWS

LENGTH: 409 words

Controversial lobbying group Alec has received an early Christmas gift from Overstock.com. The online retailer recently rejoined the group, bucking a trend among tech companies, many of which have recently disassociated themselves from it.

Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, has lost the support of a number of top tech firms in recent months over its stance on climate change. Last week eBay became the latest to cut ties to the group, which lobbies for legislative change at the state level.

Ebay's decision followed an exodus by tech firms that started after Microsoft quit the group. Following Microsoft's exit, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said his company could no longer be aligned with people who deny climate change. "They are just literally lying," he said. Alec denied Schmidt's charges.

Overstock was previously a member of Alec but let its membership lapse. Overstock confirmed it had rejoined Alec to lobby on internet sales taxation issues.

"Overstock.com did re-join Alec recently", said a spokesman. "Our relationship with Alec is based on the organization's access to lawmakers involved in the internet sales tax issue, which is a very weighty one for us. Alec's stance on climate change did not factor into our decision, one way or another".

Nick Surgey, director of research at the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy, said Overstock, unlike Google and many other Silicon Valley companies, had never espoused progressive values on climate change or other issues.

Patrick Byrne, Overstock's chief operating officer, is chairman of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a free market lobby group set up by the late Nobel economist Milton Friedman that champions vouchers for education, a cause also supported by Alec. "It appears they have made a business decision to push on a tax issue", Surgey said.

Google and Microsoft were followed away from Alec by AOL, Facebook, Yahoo and Yelp.

"In the last four months, Alec has lost the support of companies worth trillions of dollars", said Surgey.

The recent wave of tech exits followed another exodus over Alec's support of Florida's "stand your ground" legislation, which became controversial nationally after the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. Alec worked with the National Rifle Association to lobby for similar legislation in other states. Amazon, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Kraft, McDonald's and Walmart terminated their memberships after the killing.

LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

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Ebay joins Google and others in dumping Alec over climate stance;
The online retailer is the latest tech giant to leave the right wing lobbying group over its position on climate changeAlec plans anti-environment onslaughtGoogle to cut ties with Alec over climate change 'lies'Overstock.com bucks trend and joins Alec

BYLINE: Anna Codrea-Rado

SECTION: GUARDIAN SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

LENGTH: 449 words

Ebay announced on Thursday it's severing ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) because of the lobbying group's views on climate change. The online marketplace is the latest technology firm to part ways with the rightwing organization over environmental concerns.

"After our annual review of eBay's memberships in trade associations and third-party organizations, we've decided not to renew our membership with Alec," an eBay spokesperson said.

In September, Eric Schmidt announced Google would be leaving Alec because "they're just literally lying" about climate change. This prompted a wave of departures from other tech companies, including Facebook and Yelp, over similar concerns. Microsoft had previously left Alec in July.

The current exodus from Alec marks a change from a previous round of departures, in which companies left Alec over concerns about its stance on "stand your ground" legislation.

Environmental activists welcomed eBay's move. "This is a major victory for those of us who have continued to pressure eBay executives to drop Alec," said Ryan Canney, senior campaigner from the NGO Forecast the Facts.

Nick Surgey, director of research at the Center for Media and Democracy, said: "[Nearly] Alec's entire tech membership has abandoned them over climate denial."

Remaining Alec members include tobacco, telecommunications and fossil fuel companies, prompting the question of whether Alec will move away from tech issues and focus on the interests of its remaining members.

"You have to question whether Alec will continue to even work on tech issues," Surgey said.

Jonah Sachs, co-founder and CEO of Free Range, said that beneath the surface of the decision to leave the conservative group might be a concern over the economics of tackling climate change. "Some of these companies are having to deal with the issue of whether completely free, unregulated markets can deal with the problem of climate change," Sachs said.

Canney added: "With eBay out, we're looking to AT&T, Verizon, FedEx and UPS to follow suit and distance themselves from Alec's extreme climate denial agenda. If they choose to stay with Alec, we'll be taking the issue to their customers, shareholders and employees."

Alec wasn't immediately available to respond to requests for comment as its communications team is "home for the holidays", according to multiple automated email replies.

Update: This article has been updated to include more comments.

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LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

JOURNAL-CODE: WEBGNS

Let's leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution;
Tiny towns standing up to Big Oil. Gigantic marches taking on the future. Technology that works. We started to save ourselves in 2014, but we must make 2015 worth remembering - before it's too late

BYLINE: Rebecca Solnit for TomDispatch

SECTION: COMMENT IS FREE

LENGTH: 3658 words

It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I've ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.

In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award, she noted:

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It's popular to say that the experiment failed, but that's too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).

Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet's changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel - and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well.

A little revolution in a Big Oil town, a fracking ban in the Big Apple

To use Le Guin's language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given. Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it, and so this town of 107,000 mostly poor non-white people pushed back.

In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and the mayor's seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron's toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies, sometimes requiring everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors), sometimes said - by Chevron - to be harmless, as with last Thursday's flames that lit up the sky, visible as far away as Oakland.

As McLaughin put it of her era as mayor:

We've accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. We're a sanctuary city. And we're defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114m extra dollars in taxes.

For this November's election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1m to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who's long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that.

Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.

The billionaires and corporations engage in politics all the time, everywhere. They count on us to stay on the sidelines

If a small coalition like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of $228.9bn in 2013, imagine what a large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn't easy in Richmond and it won't be easy on the largest scale either, but it's not impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to dent that inevitability. The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up and exercise our power to counter theirs.

That power operated on a larger scale last week, when local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation banning fracking statewide. Until the news broke on last week, the outcome had seemed uncertain. It's a landmark, a watershed decision: a state has decided that its considerable reserves of fossil fuel will not be extracted for the foreseeable future, that other things - the health of its people, the purity of its water - matter more. And once again, the power of citizens turned out to be greater than that of industry.

Just a few days before the huge victory in New York, the nations of the world ended their most recent talks in Lima, Peru, about a global climate treaty - and they actually reached a tentative deal, one that for the first time asks all nations, not just the developed ones, to reduce emissions. The agreement has to get better - to do more, demand more of every nation - by the global climate summit in Paris in December of 2015.

It's hard to see how we'll get there from here, but easy to see that activists and citizens will have to push their nations hard. We need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy. As New York state and the town of Richmond just demonstrated, what is possible has been changing rapidly.

In the shadow of terrible news from scientists, new technology that works - and a new kind of activism

If you look at innovations in renewable energy technologies - and this may be an era in which engineers are our unsung heroes - the future seems tremendously exciting. Not long ago, the climate movement was only hoping against hope that technology could help save us from the depredations of climate change. Now, as one of the six great banners carried in the 400,000-strong September climate march in New York City proclaimed, "We have the solutions." Wind, solar and other technologies are spreading rapidly with better designs, lower costs and many extraordinary improvements that are undoubtedly but a taste of what's still to come.

In parts of the United States and the world, clean energy is actually becomingcheaper than fossil fuels. The price of oil has suddenly plunged, scrambling the situation for a while, but with one positive side benefit: it's pushed some of the filthier carbon-intensive, cutting-edge energy extraction schemes below the cost-effective point for now.

The costs of clean energy technology have themselves been dropping significantly enough that sober financial advisers like the head of the Bank of England are beginning to suggest that fossil fuels and centralized conventional power plants may prove to be bad investments. They are also talking about " the carbon bubble " (a sign that the divestment movement has worked in calling attention to the practical as well as the moral problems of the industry). So the technology front is encouraging.

That's the carrot for action; there's also a stick.

If you look at the climate reports by the scientists - and scientists are another set of heroes for our time - the news only keeps getting scarier. You probably already know the highlights: chaotic weather, regular records set for warmth on land and at sea (and 2014 heading for an all-time heat high ), 355 months in a row of above-average temperatures, more ice melting faster, more ocean acidification, the " sixth extinction ", the spread of tropical diseases, drops in food productivity with consequent famines.

So many people don't understand what we're up against, because they don't think about the Earth and its systems much or they don't grasp the delicate, intricate reciprocities and counterbalances that keep it all running as well as it has since the last ice age ended and an abundant, calm planet emerged. For most of us, none of that is real or vivid or visceral or even visible.

For a great many scientists whose fields have something to do with climate, it is. In many cases they're scared, as well as sad and unnerved, and they're clear about the urgency of taking action to limit how disastrously climate change impacts our species and the systems we depend upon.

Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart

Jamie Henn, 350.org

Some non-scientists already assume that it's too late to do anything, which - as premature despair always does - excuses us for doing nothing. Insiders, however, are generally convinced that what we do now matters tremendously, because the difference between the best- and worst-case scenarios is vast, and the future is not yet written.

After that huge climate march, I asked Jamie Henn, a cofounder of and communications director for 350.org, how he viewed this moment and he replied, "Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart," a perfect summary of the way heartening news about alternative energy and the growth of climate activism exists in the shadow of those terrible scientific reports. This brings us to our third group of heroes, who fall into the one climate category that doesn't require special qualifications: activists.

New technologies are only solutions if they're implemented and the old, carbon-emitting ones are phased out or shut down. It's clear enough that the great majority of fossil fuel reserves must be kept just where they are - in the ground - as we move away from the Age of Petroleum. That became all too obvious thanks to a relatively recent calculation made by scientists and publicized and pushed by activists (and maybe made conceivable by engineers designing replacement systems). The goal of all this: to keep the warming of the planet to 2°C (3.5°F), a target established years ago that alarmed scientists are now questioning, given the harm that nearly 1°C of warming is already doing.

Dismantling the fossil-fuel economy would undoubtedly have the side effect of breaking some of the warping power that oil has had in global and national politics. Of course, those wielding that power will not yield it without a ferocious battle - the very battle the climate movement is already engaged in on many fronts, from the divestment movement to the fight against fracking to the endeavor to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and others like it from delivering the products of the Alberta tar sands to the successful movement to shut down coal-fired power plants in the US and prevent others from being built.

From Texas to Keystone and another tunnel in Canada, this movement is bigger - and better - than it looks

If everyone who's passionate about climate change, who gets that we're living in a moment in which the fate of the Earth and of humanity is actually being decided, found their place in the movement, amazing things could happen. What's happening now is already remarkable enough, just not yet adequate to the crisis.

The divestment movement that arose a couple of years ago to get institutions to unload their stocks in fossil fuel corporations started modestly. It is now active on hundreds of college campuses and at other institutions around the world. While the intransigence or love of inertia of bureaucracies is a remarkable force, there have been notable victories. In late September, for instance, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund - made fat upon the wealth of John D Rockefeller's founding role in the rise of the petroleum industry - pledged to divest its $860m in assets from fossil fuels. It is just one of more than 800 institutions, including church denominations, universities, cities, pension funds and foundations from Scotland to New Zealand to Seattle, that have already committed to doing so.

The Keystone pipeline could have been up and running years ago, delivering the dirtiest energy from Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf Coast with little fanfare, had activists not taken it on. It has become a profoundly public, hotly debated issue, the subject of demonstrations at dozens of presidential appearances in recent years - and in the course of this ruckus, a great many people (including me) were clued in to the existence of the giant suppurating sore of sludge, bitumen and poison lakes that is the Alberta tar sands.

Canadian activists have done a similarly effective job of blocking other pipelines to keep this landlocked stuff from reaching any coast for export. One upshot of this: quite a lot of the stuff is now being put on trains (with disastrous results when they crash and, in the longer term, no less disastrous outcomes when they don't). This exceptionally dirty crude oil leaves behind extremely high levels of toxins in the mining as well as the refining process.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported :

The Keystone XL pipeline was touted as a model for energy independence and a source of jobs when TransCanada Corp. announced plans to build the 1,700-mile pipeline six years ago. But the crude-oil pipeline's political and regulatory snarls since then have emboldened resistance to at least 10 other pipeline projects across North America. As a result, six oil and natural-gas pipeline projects in North America costing a proposed $15 billion or more and stretching more than 3,400 miles have been delayed, a tally by the Wall Street Journal shows. At least four other projects with a total investment of $25 billion and more than 5,100 miles in length are facing opposition but haven't been delayed yet.

The climate movement has proved to be bigger and more effective than it looks, because most people don't see a single movement. If they look hard, what they usually see is a wildly diverse mix of groups facing global issues on the one hand and a host of local ones on the other. Domestically, that can mean Denton, Texas, banning fracking in the November election or the shutting down of coal-powered plants across the country, or the movement gearing up in California for an immense anti-fracking demonstration on 7 February.

It can mean people working on college divestment campaigns or rewriting state laws to address climate change by implementing efficiency and clean energy. It can mean the British Columbian activists who, for now, have prevented a tunnel from being drilled for a tar-sands pipeline to the Pacific Coast thanks to a months-long encampment, civil disobedience and many arrests at Burnaby Mountain near Vancouver. One of the arrested wrote in the Vancouver Observer:

[S]itting in that jail cell, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. One that I was only partially aware that I have been carrying for years now. I am ashamed by Canada's withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty and our increasingly contemptible position on climate change. If these are the values of our society then I want to be an outlaw in that society.

This is the biggest of pictures, so find your role

Just before that September climate march in New York, I began to contemplate how human beings a century from now will view those of us who lived in the era when climate change was recognized, and yet there was so much more that we could have done. They may feel utter contempt for us. They may regard us as the crew who squandered their inheritance, like drunkards gambling away a family fortune that, in this case, is everyone's everywhere and everything. I'm talking, of course, about the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will see us as people who fiddled while everything burned.

They will think we were insane to worry about celebrities and fleeting political scandals and whether we had nice bodies. They will think the newspapers should have had a gigantic black box above the fold of the front page every day saying "Here are some stories about other things, BUT CLIMATE IS STILL THE BIGGEST STORY OF ALL."

They will think that we should have thrown our bodies in front of the engines of destruction everywhere, raised our voices to the heavens, halted everything until the devastation stopped. They will bless and praise the few and curse the many.

There have been heroic climate activists in nearly every country on the planet, and some remarkable things have already been achieved. The movement has grown in size, power, and sophistication, but it's still nowhere near commensurate with what needs to be done. In the lead-up to the UN-sponsored conference to create a global climate treaty in Paris next December, this coming year will likely be decisive.

You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social.

So this is the time to find your place in a growing movement, if you haven't yet - as it is for climate organizers to do better at reaching out and offering everyone a part in the transformation, whether it's the housebound person who writes letters or the 20-year-old who's ready for direct action in remote places. This is the biggest of pictures, so there's a role for everyone, and it should be everyone's most important work right now, even though so many other important matters press on all of us. (As the Philippines's charismatic former climate negotiator Yeb Sano notes, "Climate change impinges on almost all human rights. Human rights are at the core of this issue.")

Many people believe that personal acts in private life are what matters in this crisis. They are good things, but not the key thing. It's great to bicycle rather than drive, eat plants instead of animals, and put solar panels on your roof, but such gestures can also offer a false sense that you're not part of the problem.

You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social. If you are a resident of a country that is a major carbon emitter, as is nearly everyone in the English-speaking world, you are part of the system, and nothing less than systemic change will save us.

The race is on. From an ecological standpoint, the scientists advise us that we still have a little bit of time in which it might be possible, by a swift, decisive move away from fossil fuels, to limit the damage we're setting up for those who live in the future. From a political standpoint, we have a year until the Paris climate summit, at which, after endless foot-shuffling and evading and blocking and stalling and sighing, we could finally, decades in, get a meaningful climate deal between the world's nations.

We actually have a chance, a friend who was at the Lima preliminary round earlier this month told me, if we all continue to push our governments ferociously. The real pressure for change globally comes more from within nations than from nations pressuring one another. Here in the United States, long the world's biggest carbon-emitter (until China outstripped us, partly by becoming the manufacturer of a significant percentage of our products), we have a particular responsibility to push hard. Pressure works. The president is clearly feeling it, and it's reflected in the recent US-China agreement on curtailing emissions - far from perfect or adequate, but a huge step forward.

How will we get to where we need to be? No one knows, but we do know that we must keep moving in the direction of reduced carbon emissions, a transformed energy economy, an escape from the tyranny of fossil fuel, and a vision of a world in which everything is connected. The story of this coming year is ours to write and it could be a story of Year One in the climate revolution, of the watershed when popular resistance changed the fundamentals as much as the people of France changed their world (and ours) more than 200 ago.

Two hundred years hence, may someone somewhere hold in their hands a document from 2021, in wonder, because it was written during Year Six of the climate revolution, when all the old inevitabilities were finally being swept aside, when we seized hold of possibility and made it ours. "Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings," says Ursula K Le Guin. And she's right, even if it's the hardest work we could ever do.

Now, everything depends on it.

LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

JOURNAL-CODE: WEBGNS

Global warming will cut wheat yields, research shows;
Production of wheat - one of the world's most important staple crops - is set to fall by 6% for every 1C rise in temperature, say scientists

BYLINE: Fiona Harvey

SECTION: ENVIRONMENT

LENGTH: 488 words

Global wheat yields are likely to fall significantly as climate change takes hold, new research has shown.

The researchers found that wheat production would fall by 6% for every 1C increase in temperatures. The world is now nearly certain to warm by up to 2C compared with pre-industrial levels, with political efforts concentrated on holding the potential temperature rise to no higher than that limit. But some analyses suggest that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at current rates then warming of as much as 5C could be in store.

In forecasting the effect on wheat production - one of the world's most important staple crops - the researchers tested 30 computer models against field experiments to establish the most likely scenario.

A fall of 6% in yield may not sound dramatic, but as the world's population grows the pressure on staple crops will increase.

Food price riots have been seen in several developing countries following sudden rises of less than 10% in food prices in recent years, demonstrating the vulnerability of the poor to grain prices. The global population is currently over 7bn and is forecast to rise to at least 9bn, and potentially up to 12bn, by 2050, which will put more pressure on agricultural land and water sources.

The research also counters the optimistic projections of some climate change sceptics, who argue that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase plant growth, as they take up carbon from the air for photosynthesis. But that hypothesis has been widely questioned, as the boost to growing is likely to be outweighed by other effects, such as higher temperatures affecting germination and water availability.

The scientists behind Monday's report, published as a letter in the peer-review journal Nature Climate Change, said: "Understanding how different climate factors interact and impact food production is essential when reaching decisions on how to adapt to the effects of climate change. Temperature changes alone are reported to have potentially large negative impacts on crop production, and hotspots - locations where plants suffer from high temperature stress - have been identified across the globe."

Their research could be used to help identify adaptation strategies, potentially including genetic modification or improved plant breeding. "There are several adaptation options to counter the adverse effects of climate change on global wheat production - and for some regions this will be critical," they said. "Ensemble crop modelling could be an important exploratory tool in breeding for identified genetic targets to extend grain filling, delay maturity [both of which increase the size of the crop] and improve heat tolerance in wheat cultivars and other cereals."

The lead scientist was from the University of Florida, while a large number of other US universities, and institutions in Germany, France, Mexico, Australia and China were also involved.

LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

JOURNAL-CODE: WEBGNS

Labor returns to renewable energy target talks armed with Coalition's own advice;
Government insists on an effective cut to clean energy scheme, despite its climate advisory body concluding the opposite

BYLINE: Oliver Milman

SECTION: AUSTRALIA NEWS

LENGTH: 505 words

Labor is set to resume talks with the government over the future of the renewable energy target (RET), but insists the Coalition needs to alter its negotiating position to fall in line with its own climate advisory body.

A Climate Change Authority (CCA) review of the RET, released on Monday, concluded that the scheme should not be cut, although it should be deferred by "up to three years" in order to restore investor confidence.

Investment in clean energy has virtually ground to a halt due to uncertainty over the future of the RET, which requires that 41,000 gigawatt hours of Australia's energy come from renewables such as solar and wind by 2020.

The government has sought a bipartisan deal to "reform" the RET but Labor walked away from negotiations earlier this month, claiming the Coalition's plan for a "real 20%" renewable target would devastate jobs and investment in the sector.

When the target was initially set, 41,000 GWh represented 20% of Australia's estimated 2020 energy production. But the country is now on course to produce 26% to 28% of its energy from clean courses by 2020, meaning a "real 20%" would be significantly less than 41,000 GWh.

The government and opposition have now signalled that talks will resume in January, but Labor said the Coalition needed to heed the CCA's findings.

"We do need to see a change in position from the government, a change from the prime minister's position either to abolish the target altogether or to severely cut it back," Mark Butler, Labor's environment spokesman, told the ABC.

"Both of those options the Climate Change Authority says in their report would be very, very unwise options."

Butler said Labor would "have another go" at seeing whether the Coalition would back away from its plan to make big cuts to the RET, which followed a separate review of the system headed by businessman Dick Warburton earlier this year.

"We've said we've got some flexibility - in spite of the fact we think the existing policy is working - but our flexibility only goes so far," Butler said. "Tony Abbott has to walk back from the ridiculous position he adopted earlier this year, which has been shown even by his own hand-picked panel to make no sense from whatever perspective you take."

But the Coalition has reiterated its position that Australia should produce no more than 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

"We are committed to reforming the RET and will continue to seek bipartisan support for a RET that achieves a real 20% share of renewable in Australia's energy mix by 2020," said a spokeswoman for Greg Hunt, the environment minister. "The door remains open to Labor to recommence negotiations."

Th environment group WWF said its own polling from November showed that nearly nine in 10 Australians thought the RET should be retained as it is or increased.

"Cutting the Renewable Energy Target is poor policy, it will see Australia's carbon pollution go up, sustainable energy jobs lost and investment shut out," said Kellie Caught, WWF's climate campaigner.

LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

JOURNAL-CODE: WEBGNS

Energy Options Ebb and Grow

BYLINE: By HENRY FOUNTAIN

SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Science Desk; THE BIG FIX; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1654 words

Next week, if all goes as planned, the 42-year-old nuclear reactor at the Vermont Yankee generating station will be shut down for the last time. The steam turbine at the plant, which at its peak could make enough electricity for about half a million homes with virtually no greenhouse gas emissions, will grind to a halt.

Vermont Yankee, in the river town of Vernon near the Massachusetts border, had been the target of years of protests and lawsuits by state officials, environmentalists and others concerned about safety and radioactive waste.

But in the end, the antinuclear movement didn't kill the plant. Economics did.

''People are always surprised when we say that really wasn't the driver in shutting it down,'' said Bill Mohl, the president of a division of Entergy Corporation that operates Vermont Yankee and four other nuclear plants, including Indian Point north of New York City. Although Vermont Yankee produced power inexpensively, was upgraded recently and was licensed to operate until 2032, the plant had become unprofitable in recent years, a victim largely of lower energy prices resulting from a glut of natural gas used to fire electricity plants, Mr. Mohl said.

To its advocates, nuclear power is a potent force for fighting climate change, combining the near-zero emissions of wind and solar energy with the reliability of coal and gas. And nuclear power, which provides about 19 percent of all electricity in the United States and 11 percent worldwide, could be a greater source.

But as Vermont Yankee illustrates, the nuclear industry in the United States is having trouble maintaining the status quo, much less expanding. ''It's going nowhere quickly,'' said Sharon Squassoni, who studies energy and climate change at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Overseas, the outlook is not much better.

In addition to market forces, enormous design and construction costs, questions about new federal emissions rules, uncertainty about the long-term storage of waste fuel, and public perceptions about safety after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan have all had an effect on the American nuclear industry.

Of the roughly 100 reactors in operation in the United States, four others have been permanently shut since 2012 because of market economics or the costs of repairs or safety improvements, and half a dozen or more are in jeopardy, industry analysts say. Safety concerns may eventually scuttle others close to large populations, including Indian Point.

Beyond five reactors under construction, few if any others are likely to be built anytime soon. And progress on a new generation of smaller, less expensive and potentially safer reactors has been slow.

Given that most of the still-profitable plants will reach the end of their useful lives by midcentury or sooner, it appears likely that nuclear power will play a diminishing role in the United States. ''We're going to be hard pressed just to replace those,'' Ms. Squassoni said.

All of this is encouraging to opponents of nuclear power, who are concerned about the costs, the potential for a major accident -- despite the industry's relatively good safety record -- and the hazards of storing spent fuel.

''These things are extremely expensive and prone to cost overruns,'' said Grant Smith, the senior energy policy analyst with the Civil Society Institute, a Massachusetts research group that advocates solutions to climate change. ''The high-level nuclear waste issue has never been addressed. You're talking about indefinite costs into the future.'' But the outlook for nuclear power dismays the industry and its supporters, including some environmentalists, who point out that replacing the lost electricity from Vermont Yankee and the other recently closed reactors with power from natural gas could result in the release of as much carbon dioxide as is produced yearly by two million cars or more.

''We can't take a carbon-free source of energy off the table,'' said Carol M. Browner, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency who is now with Nuclear Matters, an industry-backed group.

Overseas, some nations have retrenched from nuclear power, out of necessity or by choice. Japan shut its 50 reactors for inspections and safety improvements after Fukushima, and although two were restarted briefly, all still remain shut down and not all are expected to reopen. Germany will eventually close all 17 of its reactors as part of an ambitious transition to renewable energy.

Even China, with more than two dozen nuclear plants under construction, faces uncertainties. If the country is able to exploit its abundant reserves of shale gas, its nuclear plans may be derailed, Ms. Squassoni said.

An even bigger question is whether China's current rate of economic growth is going to continue. ''If it doesn't, what is that going to do to its energy demand?'' she said. The impetus for developing more nuclear power may dissipate.

To people in the American nuclear industry, reactors do not get the respect they deserve for being both virtually emissions-free and a source of around-the-clock electricity for the grid. Experts point to the spell of extreme cold weather across much of the country last January, when nuclear plants kept working while many gas and coal plants had to shut down as the cold affected equipment and fuel supplies.

About half of the nuclear plants sell their electricity in competitive wholesale markets, which are relatively new and complex. Electricity from generators fueled by low-cost gas is priced so low that nuclear plants cannot compete, industry analysts say, and the markets also offer advantages to new power sources, especially wind turbines, over existing sources like nuclear and coal.

''The markets are quite simply not working,'' said Richard J. Myers, the vice president for policy development at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group.

The industry is pushing for changes that would help marginal plants stay in operation. Federal price supports would be one, perhaps temporary, solution. Another would be to grant a premium to power sources, like nuclear, that can keep running under almost any circumstances.

''All of this is fixable,'' Mr. Myers said. ''The question is: Do the fixes come quickly enough?''

Other help could come as the federal government and the states develop policies under new carbon-emission rules for the power industry that were proposed by the E.P.A. in June in its Clean Power Plan. They could lead to the development of new programs, and expansion of existing ones, that put a price on greenhouse gas emissions as a means of limiting them.

''The biggest thing that is going to drive people to clean solutions is going to be a cap on carbon,'' said Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and E.P.A. head who is now an industry advocate.

The industry's recent struggles represent something of a reversal from the previous decade, when there was talk of a nuclear revival in the United States after nearly 30 years without any new reactor construction permits being issued. Even then, however, some experts questioned just how much nuclear power could grow in the United States and abroad, and how much it could contribute to the effort to reduce carbon emissions.

In a report she prepared in 2009, Ms. Squassoni wrote that in light of steep construction costs, only a handful of new reactors would come on line by 2015, even in the best of circumstances.

''If you really wanted to reduce carbon emissions through nuclear, it was going to be incredibly expensive,'' she said. ''You'd have to build an incredible number of power plants.''

Now plants are even more expensive, in part because of new safety requirements in the wake of Fukushima. So-called small modular reactors have been proposed as a lower-cost alternative. There are many different designs -- at least one is meant to run on waste fuel -- but the federal Department of Energy has provided significant development money only for two designs that are smaller variations of the most common kind of reactor.

Ashley Finan, an analyst with the Clean Air Task Force, which focuses on technologies to fight climate change, said that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had not made it easy for alternative designs to win backing from private investors.

''There's a lack of a clear and predictable regulatory pathway,'' Dr. Finan said. ''You're really not able to attract funding without a clear regulatory process.''

As a result, small modular reactors are many years from reality in the United States. Overseas, there are only a few isolated small-reactor projects underway, including one under construction in China.

Most modular designs have features that are intended to make them safer than existing reactors. Safety, as always, looms large in the debate about nuclear power. Although some watchdog groups point to incidents like leaks of radioactive water from some plants, the industry in the United States promotes its safety record, noting that events like unplanned reactor shutdowns are at historical lows. And the American industry's one major accident, at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, pales in comparison with Fukushima or the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union.

But Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that in discussions of adding more nuclear power to help curb emissions and fight climate change, the issue of safety takes on a new dimension.

''You can't rationally bet a big part of your climate change abatement plan on a technology that you may suddenly find you don't want to use anymore,'' Mr. Bradford said. A major accident, for example, might force the entire industry to shut down, at least temporarily. ''There's no other low-carbon alternative with the potential to develop a large hole like that.''

The Big Fix: Articles in this series are examining potential solutions to climate change.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/science/nuclear-carbon-free-but-not-free-of-unease-.html

LOAD-DATE: December 24, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Nuclear fuel storage units at the Vermont Yankee plant, which is to shut down next week. Industry opponents cite the hazards of storing spent fuel. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TOBY TALBOT/ASSOCIATED PRESS) (D2)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: News; Series

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Natural Gas: Abundance of Supply and Debate

BYLINE: By JOHN SCHWARTZ

SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Science Desk; THE BIG FIX; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1707 words

MEAD, Colo. -- Natural gas is the Rorschach test of energy policy. Depending on one's point of view, it can be either an essential tool for meeting the challenge of climate change or another dirty fossil fuel that will speed the planet down the path to calamitous warming.

President Obama is in the first camp. He sang the praises of natural gas in his State of the Union address in January, saying, ''If extracted safely, it's the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.'' But many environmental activists have denounced shale drilling because of the potential health risks that were cited by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York last week when he announced a ban on hydraulic fracturing in the state.

They also say that the growing use of plentiful natural gas is accelerating climate change and sapping the urgency to promote energy efficiency and developing renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. ''It's time to stop searching for a bridge and simply take the leap,'' Bill McKibben, an environmental campaigner, said earlier this year.

Because burning natural gas produces about half the planet-heating carbon dioxide than coal does for the same energy output, many energy experts suggest that natural gas has an important role to play in reducing carbon emissions. But in the debate over natural gas, nearly every fact is contested, including the amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that escapes into the atmosphere while the gas is being drilled and transported. There is little doubt, however, that the abundant natural gas unearthed by hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking) and other drilling technologies have transformed the energy economy. Natural gas now produces 27 percent of the electricity generated in the United States, and the percentage is rising. The plentiful oil and gas from the drilling boom has reduced America's dependence on foreign oil to levels not seen in decades, and has contributed to falling oil prices.

But recent studies suggest the effects of relying on natural gas and expanding its use will provide no lasting benefit to the environment compared with burning coal unless policies are enacted to hasten the adoption of renewable technologies -- to make the bridge a short one.

Since 2005, carbon emissions from electricity generation dropped to 2.05 billion metric tons a year in 2013 from 2.5 billion. (They rose slightly this year because of the unusually cold months in early 2014.) But continuing to expand the use of natural gas instead of lower-carbon alternatives could wipe out any gains, said Haewon C. McJeon, a researcher with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who participated in a recent study on natural gas.

''In the absence of a climate-change-mitigation policy, having abundant, low-cost natural gas alone is not going to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions,'' he said.

The best role for natural gas is as a complement to renewable energy sources, said Hal Harvey, who runs a policy research group called Energy Innovation in San Francisco. He noted that power plants that run on natural gas can ramp up more easily than, say, coal or nuclear plants, and can fill the energy gaps for solar panels and wind turbines when the sun is not shining or the wind dies.

Gas-fired plants can also be built relatively quickly and cheaply -- factors that led to a jump in gas-plant construction that actually preceded the natural gas boom.

But the advantages of natural gas are offset, in part, by persistent problems and questions surrounding leaks of its main component, methane. Because of methane's ability to trap infrared radiation more effectively than CO2, its effect on climate change is 84 times greater on a 20-year basis. However, its life in the atmosphere before being eliminated by chemical reactions is measured in years, while CO2 persists for centuries.

Methane comes from many sources -- the most recent Environmental Protection Agency inventory of greenhouse gas emissions estimated that a quarter of the total comes from burps and flatulence from cows and other livestock (the microbes in their digestive systems produce methane as a byproduct of breaking down their feed).

The methane that is created or that escapes from using natural gas as an energy source represents 23 percent. Other sources include coal beds and landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency estimate puts the amount of methane released from drilling and transporting natural gas at eight million metric tons a year, but recent reports suggest the figure could be far larger.

Anthony R. Ingraffea, a researcher at Cornell University who has been sharply critical of fracking, said that the gas industry had been lax in what it calls ''wellbore integrity,'' which refers to the steel and cement that drillers use to seal off wells from the surrounding rock, soil and groundwater. The seal tends to deteriorate over time, he said, and abandoned wells have been found to leak methane, as well. ''Out of the four or five million wells drilled on earth, nobody knows how many of them are leaking into the atmosphere, or how much they are leaking,'' he said.

The industry points to progress that has already been made in reducing methane emissions -- a 73 percent decrease from hydraulically fractured wells since 2011, according to the E.P.A.

''It's difficult to look at the available data and say there is a huge problem here,'' said Steve Everley, a spokesman for Energy in Depth, an industry group. ''Not only is production increasing, but emissions are going down.''

The agency's figure on lower emissions from wells, however, does not account for the leaks that commonly occur farther downstream in the production process, where equipment like pneumatic devices and compressors have been identified as emissions sources. Research sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund suggests that gas leaks can be cut by 40 percent at a relatively low cost: a penny for every thousand cubic feet of natural gas produced.

''The good news is we know we can get significant reductions for marginal cost,'' said Mark Brownstein, associate vice president of the organization's United States climate and energy program. Producers and regulators must do a better job of reducing risk, he said.

Fixing the problem of leaking methane can be achieved more easily than many other environmental challenges, said Mr. Harvey of Energy Innovation. Compared with ''thermodynamic problems'' like making automobiles more efficient and ''chemical problems'' like reducing smokestack pollutants, methane is largely a ''plumbing problem,'' Mr. Brownstein said, and ''plumbing is dead simple.''

One of the nation's biggest gas producers, Anadarko, said that gas leaks can be minimized without much effort. The company consulted with Colorado regulators on trailblazing state rules that call for drillers to use infrared cameras to detect leaks and then plug them quickly.

Here in Mead, 45 miles north of Denver, a production facility prepares the oil and gas from six wells for pipelines that will take the fuel to processing facilities. The big machines separate oil and recovered fluid from natural gas, and put about six million cubic feet of natural gas into the pipeline every day.

Wrench-wielding Anadarko inspectors search for leaks -- ''fugitive gas'' -- as often as monthly at major facilities, and tighten flanges that may have shaken loose. The equipment, too, is designed to minimize leaks. The valves on these pneumatic devices are run with compressed air; the more standard industry practice is to use the pressure of the extracted natural gas to power them, which means gas can escape. Instead, what is vented here is simply air.

Not every company takes such pains, and industry experts say there is a big difference between the best actors and some of the smaller players who generate more than their share of environmental damage.

Korby Bracken, Anadarko's director of health, safety and environmental issues in the Rockies, invited a visitor to look inside the steel smokestack column through a small sight glass. A pilot light burned inside, and after all the effort to capture, contain and sell gas, having it consumed in a six-inch column of flame clearly irked him. ''We'd rather put it in the pipeline,'' he said.

Anadarko officials say their goal is to use the technologies employed at this site -- which was so clean that a rabbit sat below one of its warm tanks, grooming its ears, on a chilly November day -- wherever possible. Some sites are too remote for an electrical hookup to power air compressors, but the infrared cameras are being used throughout the company's facilities.

The Obama administration has tried to straddle the promise and risks of the natural gas boom by hailing the benefits of increased production while targeting carbon and methane emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency proposed rules in June, known as the Clean Power Plan, to reduce carbon produced by electricity plants. That would call for more plants to run on natural gas rather than coal which currently produces 74 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

The plan also would require greater use of renewable energy sources and nuclear power in order to meet the president's target, announced last month with China, of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 28 percent by 2025.

In March, the administration announced the plan aimed at reducing methane leaks. The E.P.A., under this ''Strategy to Reduce Methane Emissions,'' is expected to publish its proposed rules next month.

Ultimately, fighting over the relative merits of natural gas compared to other fossil fuels misses the broader energy challenge for the nation and the world, said Steven Cohen, the executive director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

''Everybody's looking for a big fix -- a magic bullet,'' Mr. Cohen said. ''I don't think any of the existing technologies will do what we need to do to get to the renewable energy economy.'' The challenge, he added, is to spur the same kind of technology revolution that transformed bulky computers into pocket-size devices.

''You need some kind of technology that doesn't exist now,'' he said.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/science/natural-gas-abundance-of-supply-and-debate-.html

LOAD-DATE: December 24, 2014

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Workers building a nuclear reactor in Waynesboro, Ga., one of just five under construction in the United States, where nuclear energy is waning. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN BAZEMORE/ASSOCIATED PRESS) (D1)
Korby Bracken giving a tour of an Anadarko oil production facility. Anadarko, one of the nation's biggest gas producers, has a site so clean that on a chilly day in November, a rabbit opted to sit below one of its warm tanks. The company uses infrared cameras to detect leaks and then plug them quickly. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW STAVER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
JOHN SCHWARTZ) (D3)